


Above All Shadows

by potatoesanddreams



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Horror, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Existential Angst, Gen, Halls of Mandos, Hope, I tagged major character death because the main character is already dead when the story begins, Loneliness, Memories, Orcs, Orcs Are Elves, Redemption, Sort of anyway, Tolkien Gen Week, Tolkien Gen Week Day 4: Solo, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25170685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/potatoesanddreams/pseuds/potatoesanddreams
Summary: Where was his purpose? Where was the pressure of the great Mind on his mind, dashing him against the enemy walls? Where even were his fellow-soldiers to brawl with, his enemies to slaughter or be slaughtered by? Where was it all, anything to maim, to build, to burn, to kill, to obey, to plunder, to take captive? The great expanse around him wanted nothing of him – if it had sought to devour him that would have been better, that would have been a familiar fear. But it was utterly without desire – it was still with the stillness of death.-One of Sauron's orcish soldiers dies. This does not mean his life is over.Published for Tolkien Gen Week, Day Four: solo.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 59
Collections: Tolkien Gen Week 2020





	Above All Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> This will eventually be a multi-chapter fic, but I have absolutely no idea when I will be updating it. This first chapter stands on its own as a complete story.

It was dark, and yet not dark; it was nothing like night in the war-camps, with the black smoke blotting out the foul stars. There had been comfort in that darkness, the air so close his eyes would smart and his throat tighten against it, the feel and the smell of it reminding him at every moment where he was – that he was somewhere. And with all that, the certain knowledge that his eyes could see farther in the smoke than any of the eyes of his Master’s enemies.

This was not so. It was an open darkness, vast and silent, and it stretched off in every direction without so much as a ripple in the air, an altered shadow, to mark where its bounds might be. He could see nothing, and that was frightening, and the fear made him angry. It was the worse because the darkness was so unconcealing – he knew, somehow, that he could see nothing because there was nothing to see, and that meant there was nothing against which to direct his rage, nothing to kill to make himself safe from the stillness that surrounded him. He must escape it; but it stretched on and on, as far as he stared into the distance – although _was_ he staring? – until his courage failed and he fled back to himself, the only point of being in that great emptiness.

Where was his purpose? Where was the pressure of the great Mind on his mind, dashing him against the enemy walls? Where even were his fellow-soldiers to brawl with, his enemies to slaughter or be slaughtered by? Where was it all, anything to maim, to build, to burn, to plunder, to obey, to tear down, to slaughter, to take captive? The great expanse around him wanted nothing of him – if it had sought to devour him that would have been better, that would have been a familiar fear. But it was utterly without desire – it was still with the stillness of death.

Was he a dead thing, then? Had that scrap with those impudent Easterling Men really finished him off? It was the last thing he remembered, the press of bodies and the taste of blood in the air, his sword twisting like a snake, biting deep into muscle and flesh. He could not recall how the battle had ended. A pain – then a command – perhaps? – that he had heeded – and now this nothing.

He supposed that must be how it was to die.

But if he was dead, why had he not been burned, or devoured, or else rotted away? Who had brought him here – who had left him behind in this emptiness? He would kill them. He would rend the flesh from their bones – he howled, or tried to howl, but there was nothing to howl _in_ or _with._ His throat – was it his throat? – was as empty as the space around him. There was nothing to frighten. He was alone.

He tried to shut his eyes – and were they eyes? – but he could not occlude the nothing from his sight. His eyelids did nothing to hide it – no – he _had_ no eyelids – had they rotted off him? But then why had his other soft parts not rotted also? His eyes themselves, his tongue, his skin, they all remained – yet thinking of each in turn, he found that he could not feel them. His hands, his stomach, his gullet, even his teeth, all slipped like shadows as he thought of them from where he had sensed them before – or only assumed he must sense them. His shoulder-muscles, his jaw, his heart itself – all gone, and what was left of him that he lingered here? What thin bare remnant, rent from flesh and blood and bone? Who could pick him so terribly clean of himself?

Only the Master of them had power such as that.

And so it must have been that Power that had flung him here, because his dead hand could no longer hold a sword. And now he had thought of that, it did not surprise him. They were nothing, after all, to the Mind that weighed on theirs – nothing but a blade and a body to wield against the enemy, and when that use was gone, what good in keeping them? Only – the Master could at least have destroyed him, when he was through! Why should this scrap of him be left behind, to exist without purpose in a field of emptiness, perhaps forever? Of course the Master of them did not care – he had known that always, had hated him always, hated him now still more. He hated him, and he keened for him soundlessly in the quiet dark, to come back, to take him back, to give him pain and blood-madness and a reason to be.

He curled in upon himself, and tried to gnaw at what he might earlier have taken for his bones. But what was left would not be marked and would not be destroyed.

How long he remained like that he could not have said. He wrapped himself around himself as if to strangle, and he pretended that it hurt, and pretended that this pain was the pain of wounds in battle; but in truth there was no pain at all, and at last he knew that he would never make himself believe the lie. That knowledge was as if the terrible unconcealment of the place had crept within him, and he had no recourse against it; again he tried to howl, and he thought to tear at the darkness, but it was not there, and it was not there, and he alone was there and could make himself believe nothing else. So at last in loneliness and desperation he huddled softly into his own being, and did not try any more to feel as if in pain. He cradled himself and was still; and then it seemed to him for a confused moment that another held him, that great strong arms were about him and a woman’s voice sang a low and tuneless air.

But it was a memory – a memory he had not known he carried.

At that a nameless fear came on him, and he trembled in the depths of his being. Yet alongside the fear he felt something else, something stranger. The memory sang softly to him, and he thought of trying to escape it – but he hesitated, for the voice of it drew him. He could almost distinguish the words. It was something about safety, and rest, and a warm fire – then he felt the memory buckle beneath the weight of his scrutiny, and that filled him at once with great dread and great relief, so that he did not know which impulse to heed. It seemed to him that the song was fleeing him, the thread of the melody broken into confused fragments interspersed with silence, and part of him said, good riddance to it, for it is frightening! But with another part of him he leaped after it, even before he realized what choice he had made. He caught it by the tail, but it slipped away from him like water, and his whole inward being made another desperate leap – and at the end of that leap he found that the song was no longer memory, for he was singing it himself.

That was the first sound he heard in the darkness – his own voice, thin and cracked and wavering, divorced from the harsh power his body had once lent it. He did not know the words of the song, but somehow they came anyhow, one by one, and he dared not pause to wonder how that might be, for fear that he would break whatever gentle power was allowing it.

They were strange words to hear himself sing. Soft they were, soft as a body unarmored, without a hint in them of threat or victory. _Sleep, sleep,_ but not as a captain to his company, not as a mocking guard to his prisoner. His voice spiraled slowly around him. _You need not be afraid._

That was absurd – and yet singing, he found that he believed it.

After a time – he could not have said how long a time – the song drew round again to its beginning. The line that he now sang he recognized as the first that the woman had sung in his memory; but then it had been hazy and the words unclear. Now he heard it plainly, even as his voice followed the thread of the song to its slow ending. _Sleep, little one, your mother’s here._

There was silence again, and no mother in it.

He thought for a moment that he had been stricken by a blade, so strong was the ache that drove through to the core of him. But there was nothing left of him that a blade might have wounded – and yet he felt the shock of wounding in him, the bright elongated instant when the pain began, then the crumpling inward, trying to hold himself together, feeling the hurt tunnel through him like questing roots. He was alone – and the song was gone, finished; it had not saved him, had not drawn him out of the darkness. Here he remained – and he felt the pain of it in the depths of him, as if something vital were rending itself out of place to follow what the song had given him – the strong arms holding him – the peace. But the emptiness was unbroken. There was no one to comfort him. He was alone.

He wept then, helpless as a new-whelped child, silently at first and then – without realization – aloud. His cries fell softly from him, and he felt them pool about him in the dark, bounded by nothing yet ever rising, until he thought he would drown in the depths of them. Still he could not halt his grief, and he wept on, though he had never found a use in tears; and at last it seemed to him that the very darkness about him echoed with his voice, making a great chorus of mourners out of his loneliness, so that the sea of grief about him flowed thick with wild harmonies. Still he wept – but now he listened also. For in them he thought he could hear something of the song that had come to him, and comforted him, and gone away again. It was only his own voice that rang about him, multiplied, and no one bent his throat to a melody; yet the melody was there, clear and sorrowful and entrancing – no devising of his thought, yet flowing from himself alone.

At length his weeping wore the edges from his pain, and his cries gentled, little by little, until they came to a slow and quiet closure. The echoes faded languidly, resounding through him for a while even after his own voice had stilled. He listened, curious, feeling the hurt place within him like a wound just beginning to mend. The waves shrank down to ripples, and the ripples to stillness. Then all again was quiet. It rested him, and he lay in it for a moment or longer, and wondered, because in all his lifetime he had never made such a thing as that music; and when sorrow began to rise in him again, he shuddered once, and steeled himself, and – hummed.

It was a rough noise, of uncertain pitch. It wavered in the silence and did not echo, but he heard it clearly. He let it fade, and hummed again, a different note. The hurt place within him seemed to itch. He felt as though he were shaking loose a heavy fetter, and at the same time as though he were stepping out over the edge of an abyss.

His voice faltered for a moment.

He held the note.

The sound went on and on, filling the silence; he had no need to pause for breath, and indeed the humming seemed to grow easier as he continued. Impulsively he made the pitch float higher, and for a moment then he was seized by fear, certain that he had ruined everything by his interference. But his voice held the new note as it had the old, and with dawning wonder he realized that he had not ruined anything at all – only he did not quite like the way the second pitch followed the first, so tentatively he drifted higher still, until he found another place that pleased him. He stayed there awhile. Then, gathering his courage, he dropped to a deep low tone, as deep as he could imagine. He crept deeper yet, moment by moment, and when he could find no boundary at which his voice rebelled, his humming broke and he laughed until the echoes rang out golden in the dark.

Then he grew very still, and as the echoes faded he looked out into the emptiness around him as he had done before. It stretched away on all sides, and it was as boundless as it had ever been. It had no edges – nothing girdled it, no wall nor palisade nor mountain-fence. Nothing was within it but himself and the echoes of his music – there was no great Mind overshadowing his own, either to set him loose or to make him stay…

He laughed again for wonder, and a little at himself. Then he drew himself together, and went out of the dark.


End file.
